David Koch, Billionaire Who Fueled Right-Wing Movement, Dies at 79

A man-about-town philanthropist, he and his brother Charles ran a business colossus while furthering a libertarian agenda that reshaped American politics.

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The industrialist and philanthropist David H. Koch at a dinner party on the opening night of the New York City Ballet season in 2008. The Lincoln Center theater where the troupe performed had been renamed in his honor that year after he had pledged $100 million to it.CreditCreditGetty Images

David H. Koch, an industrialist who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, died on Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 79.

Charles G. Koch announced the death in a statement, which noted that David Koch had been treated for prostate cancer in the past. “Twenty-seven years ago,” the statement said, “David was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given a grim prognosis of a few years to live. David liked to say that a combination of brilliant doctors, state of the art medications and his own stubbornness kept the cancer at bay.”

Hitching his star to the soaring ambitions of Charles, his older brother, David Koch (pronounced coke) became one of the world’s richest people, with assets of $42.2 billion in 2019 and a 42 percent stake in the family enterprise, Koch Industries, a Kansas-based energy and chemicals conglomerate. He also became a nationally known philanthropist and the early public face of the Koch political ascendancy, as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president in 1980.

Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party.

A gregarious, socially prominent New Yorker who loved the ballet, Mr. Koch saw his name emblazoned on cornices at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital — the Manhattan institutions on which some of his $1.2 billion in charitable gifts were bestowed.

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Mr. Koch, left, the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate, appeared at a rally in Los Angeles in 1980 with the party’s presidential candidate, Ed Clark. At right was Mr. Clark’s wife, Alicia Garcia Clark.CreditRandy Rasmussen/Associated Press

He was a familiar figure at society galas, a 6-foot-5 former college basketball star who long held the single-game scoring record — 41 points — for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, the Engineers. He also had what New York magazine called a “seemingly limitless storehouse of Elks club-inflected jokes, which are often followed by his loud, wheezy honk of a laugh.”

In addition to Southampton, Mr. Koch had palatial homes on Park Avenue in Manhattan, in Aspen, Colo., and in Palm Beach, Fla. He kept a yacht in the Mediterranean for summer getaways and rented it out for $500,000 a week. His friends and acquaintances included Bill and Melinda Gates, Prince Charles and Winston Churchill’s grandson Winston Spencer Churchill.

He had both bad experiences and good luck. He survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people at Los Angeles International Airport. He broke down in tears on a witness stand in Kansas during a civil trial that nearly tore his family apart over money. And for years, he and Charles faced, and denied, accusations of having exploited libertarian principles for self-serving purposes.

They insisted that they adhered to a traditional belief in the liberty of the individual, and in free trade, free markets and freedom from what they called government “intrusions,” including taxes, military drafts, compulsory education, business regulations, welfare programs and laws that criminalized homosexuality, prostitution and drug use.

An Electoral Force

Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.

But they said they had not given money to any Tea Party candidates. “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event,” David Koch told New York magazine in 2010. “No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.”

Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.

Among the groups they supported was the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. Alec, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.

As part of their longstanding crusade for lower taxes and smaller government, the Koch brothers in recent years opposed dozens of transit-related initiatives in cities and counties across the country, a review by The New York Times found. Campaigns coordinated and financed by Americans for Prosperity fought state legislation to fund transportation projects, mounted ad campaigns and public forums to defeat transit plans, and organized phone banks to convince citizens that public transit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

By early 2017, Charles and David Koch, with a combined net worth of more than $100 billion, had become the leaders of a libertarian juggernaut loosely allied with the Republican Party, which, after eight years in the wings, again controlled the White House, both houses of Congress and many state legislatures.

Under the administration of Donald J. Trump, the Koch brothers’ prospects in Washington seemed improved, at least superficially. But beneath the surface lay substantive political and personal differences between the Kochs and Mr. Trump. While the Kochs did not endorse him, David Koch attended his election night victory party and later met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The Kochs contributed heavily to Vice President Mike Pence’s two campaigns for governor of Indiana, and counted a half-dozen close allies among the president’s cabinet choices and Republican advisers.

“The Kochs will be key figures in any discussion about what direction the party takes after 2016,” The Times reported in September that year, “and they are determined to steer it toward their free-market vision.”

That proved prophetic. As the 2018 congressional elections approached, the Kochs’ frustrations with Mr. Trump broke into an ugly and open exchange between Charles Koch and the president. Charles denounced Mr. Trump’s restrictive trade and immigration policies as divisive, and threatened to withhold the family’s support for Republican candidates who opposed the free-trade, government-shrinking policies at the heart of the Koch political philosophy. Mr. Trump struck back on Twitter, calling the Koch political apparatus “overrated” and “a total joke in real Republican circles.”

Politics and Profits

Critics accused the Kochs of buying influence and using their political machine to manipulate elections and government policies under a guise of patriotism and freedom. Those efforts, the critics said, cloaked an agenda to cut taxes and federal regulations governing business, the environment and other interests, primarily to benefit the Koch family and its enterprises.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer and a critic of the Koch brothers, said in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” (2016), that the libertarian policies they embraced benefited Koch chemical and fossil fuel businesses, which were among the nation’s worst polluters, and paid millions in fines and court judgments for hazardous-waste violations.

“Lowering taxes and rolling back regulations, slashing the welfare state and obliterating the limits on campaign spending might or might not have helped others,” Ms. Mayer wrote, “but they most certainly strengthened the hand of extreme donors with extreme wealth.” The Koch brothers rejected the allegations.

Koch money also funded initiatives to undercut climate science and to counter efforts to address climate change. As Ms. Mayer put it in her book, “The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits.”

In interviews after the book was published, Ms. Mayer said that investigators who she believed were hired by the Koch brothers had tried to intimidate her by digging up false information, including accusations of plagiarism, to smear her reputation.

While the brothers portrayed themselves as equal partners promoting libertarian ideas, Charles was the major decision maker, just as he was the dominant voice in Koch enterprises, according to Daniel Schulman’s 2014 biography, “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.”

There were other differences. Charles has lived most of his life in a walled compound in Wichita, Kan., a secretive kingpin surrounded by lawyers, public relations retainers and security guards. By all accounts he reads economics, history and political philosophy, listens to opera, eats lunch in the company cafeteria with his employees and rarely gives press interviews.

David, by contrast, was an extrovert who attended several dinner parties a week and bantered with reporters, politicians and friends in New York society. His outgoing personality was on display in a nationally televised interview with Barbara Walters on ABC in 2014. His vice-presidential run with Ed Clark, an oil company lawyer nominated as the Libertarian presidential candidate, drew nearly a million votes.

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Mr. Koch and his brother Charles, center, greeted Samuel Ramey, a bass with the New York City Opera, at an event at Lincoln Center in 2009. David Koch was a socially prominent figure in New York.CreditPatrick McMullan, via Getty Images

Brothers Against Brothers

David Hamilton Koch was born in Wichita on May 3, 1940, the third of four sons of Fred Chase Koch, an oil engineer and entrepreneur, and the former Mary Clementine Robinson, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a Kansas City physician.

David and his brothers — Frederick, seven years older; Charles, five years older, and David’s twin, William — grew up in Wichita under the discipline of an emotionally distant father, who taught them to fight and compete with one another. That spirit carried into adulthood, engendering feuds and lawsuits that became public displays of avarice and fraternal malice.

Fred Koch made millions in the 1920s and ’30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. Fiercely anti-Communist, he co-founded the right-wing John Birch Society and created the Wichita company that became Koch Industries.

After Fred Koch’s death in 1967, his sons inherited significant stakes in the company. Charles became chairman, chief executive and the strategist behind its expansion into chemicals, pipelines and consumer goods, eventually making Koch Industries the nation’s second-largest private conglomerate, with interests in 60 countries, more than 100,000 employees and annual revenue of more than $100 billion.

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David Koch in 2011. As his health declined, he stepped away from his political and business interests in 2018. CreditGretchen Ertl for The New York Times

David graduated from the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at M.I.T., earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s in 1963. He worked for engineering firms in Cambridge, Mass., and New York City before joining the family company in 1970 as a technical services manager. But he did not settle in Wichita, as Charles had.

Instead, he founded a Koch Industries office in New York City, where he had already put down roots. He was known as a playboy whose penthouse parties were attended by models. In 1979, he was named president of his own division, Koch Engineering, which later morphed into Koch Chemical Technology Group. He became executive vice president of the parent company in 1981.

The oldest brother, Frederick, was the only sibling who took no active role in the family business; he attended Harvard and Yale and became a collector and patron of the arts. He was estranged from his father, who disowned and partly disinherited him, but Frederick’s shares in Koch Industries made him wealthy and proved critical later in a family fight for control of the company.

After earning a doctorate in chemical engineering, David’s twin, William, joined the company as a consultant in 1971, but never fit in. He moved from one job to another and complained that Charles was devoting too much money to libertarianism. In 1980, William attempted a boardroom coup to seize control of the company. It failed, and he was dismissed.

In a series of lawsuits that dragged on for years, William and Frederick claimed that Charles and David had cheated them out of $2 billion in a 1983 settlement that paid $1.1 billion for their 5.5 million shares of Koch Industries. Accusations of instability, greed and nefarious conduct peppered the trial, and at one point David sobbed as he testified of family tensions so bitter that private investigators had been hired to pilfer trash and bribe janitors to dig up dirt.

In 1998, a federal jury in Topeka, Kan., finally ruled that the plaintiffs were owed nothing more, and in 2001 Charles, David and William reconciled, signing a settlement whose terms were not disclosed. They shared a meal for the first time in nearly two decades.

Setbacks and a Retirement

On Feb. 1, 1991, a Boeing 737 USAir flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles, carrying 89 people, including David Koch, crashed into a small commuter plane on landing. All 12 people on the commuter plane and 22 passengers on the jetliner were killed. In a smoky, crowded cabin, Mr. Koch pried open an exit and leaped to the tarmac, escaping with cuts and burned lungs.

He learned he had prostate cancer in 1992. He had surgery and radiation and hormone treatments that kept the disease in check for decades. All his brothers had prostate cancer and were said to have been cured.

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Mr. Koch flashed a victory sign at the opening of the David H. Koch Plaza at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014. He had given $65 million for its restoration.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

Mr. Koch stepped away from his political and business interests in June 2018. In a letter to employees of Koch Industries announcing his brother’s retirement, Charles Koch said that David’s deteriorating health had made it impossible for him to continue working. The letter did not disclose the nature of his illness. David’s presence in social and political circles, which once ran at the highest levels, had been declining for several years.

A bachelor until he was 56, Mr. Koch married Julia Flesher, a former Adolfo fashion assistant, in 1996. They had three children: David Jr., Mary Julia and John Mark. All survive him.

Mr. Koch’s philanthropies went mostly to medical, educational and cultural institutions. He listed gifts of more than $395 million in recent decades. The largest was $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to build the David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care in a 23-story structure in Manhattan.

At Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the ballet venue became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 after he pledged $100 million. Another $100 million went to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for an ambulatory center, and he gave $65 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was a trustee, for the reconstruction of its plaza along Fifth Avenue. Both were named after him.

A dinosaur buff as a boy, Mr. Koch also gave millions to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing and to the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, for the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils, which opened in June.

“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Mr. Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”

Correction:Aug. 23, 2019

An earlier version of this obituary, using information from a family spokesman, misidentified Mr. Koch's place of death. It was at his home in Southampton, N.Y., not at his home in Manhattan.

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mogul Whose Fortune Steered Politics to the Right. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe